Dana Suesse

Dana Suesse, born Nadine Dana Suesse on December 3, 1909, in Kansas City, Missouri, was an American composer, lyricist, and musician whose career spanned Broadway, popular songwriting, and classical composition. She died on October 16, 1987.

As a child in the Midwest, Suesse performed on vaudeville circuits in an act combining dancing and piano playing, during which she would invite audience members to suggest a theme and then improvise upon it. When she outgrew ballet, she turned her focus to piano study under Gertrude Concannon. In 1926, she and her mother relocated to New York City, where she continued her musical education under Alexander Siloti, a pupil of Franz Liszt, and studied composition with Rubin Goldmark, one of George Gershwin's own teachers. After World War II, she spent three years studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, having been recommended to Boulanger by orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett.

Suesse's Broadway credits include It Takes Two and Macbeth, with her first Broadway appearance dating to 1928. Among the original productions for which she composed are Sweet and Low (1930), You Never Know (1938), Crazy with the Heat (1941), and incidental music for both The Seven Year Itch (1952) and The Golden Fleecing (1959). She also contributed to the Ziegfeld Follies of 1934, writing "Moon About Town" and "Missouri Misery" with lyricist E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, the former written for performer Jane Froman.

Her popular songwriting brought her considerable recognition in the 1930s, when the press dubbed her "the girl Gershwin." Two of her most enduring songs, "My Silent Love," derived from a larger work called "Jazz Nocturne," and "You Oughta Be in Pictures," written with lyricist Eddie Heyman, became widely known hits. In January 1933, Fortune magazine included her photograph alongside eight other music industry figures under the headline "Nine Assets of a Prosperous Organization." In 1931, bandleader Paul Whiteman commissioned her to compose "Concerto in Three Rhythms," following the model of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. In early 1932, she recorded a piano roll of the Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal tune "Was That the Human Thing to Do" for the Aeolian Company's Duo-Art reproducing piano system.

Beginning in 1930, Suesse entered a songwriting partnership with impresario Billy Rose that continued into the 1940s. In 1936, she spent three months in Fort Worth, Texas, composing the score for Rose's Casa Mañana, an outdoor dinner theatre production staged as part of the Fort Worth Frontier Centennial. With Rose and Irving Kahal, she wrote "The Night Is Young and You're So Beautiful," which placed fifth on Your Hit Parade on the broadcast of February 6, 1937, and remained on the program for six weeks. Recordings of the song were made in 1937 by the Jan Garber, George Hall, and Wayne King orchestras, and Ray Anthony's orchestra revived it as a hit in 1951. On June 13, 1937, Amon G. Carter arranged for Rose and Suesse to attend a White House dinner as guests of President and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, after which music from Casa Mañana was performed by cast member Everett Marshall. Suesse also wrote "Yours for a Song," with lyricist Ted Fetter, which served as the theme of Rose's Aquacade at the 1939 New York World's Fair, and in the 1940s she served as Rose's staff composer for his Diamond Horseshoe Revues.

On December 11, 1974, Suesse and her husband produced a symphony concert at Carnegie Hall devoted entirely to her compositions. The Newport Music Festival in Rhode Island presented four of her works on July 31, 1975. On September 24, 2003, conductor John McGlinn led the BBC Concert Orchestra in a program of American music that included three of her compositions. In the 1990s, producer Robert Stern released a CD of the Carnegie Hall concert using masters from Voice of America.

Suesse married Courtney Burr on July 26, 1940, in Fauquier County, Virginia; they divorced on June 29, 1954. She married businessman Charles Edwin Delinks on April 16, 1971, and remained with him until his death in 1981. Following his death, she returned to New York, where she took two apartments at the Gramercy Park Hotel and continued writing for the theatre. At the time of her death from a stroke on October 16, 1987, she was completing a new musical, Mr. Sycamore, which had been optioned for off-Broadway, and was seeking a New York production for a straight play titled Nemesis.